Ben Bajarin is the Director of Consumer Technology Analysis and Research at Creative Strategies, Inc, a technology industry analysis and market intelligence firm located in Silicon Valley.
A couple years ago, Intel was keen on steering people away from netbooks. The chip maker asked retailers to warn consumers about what netbooks can’t do, and created the “ultra-thin” category to provide a more powerful — and more expensive — alternative.
Faced with tough competition from tablets, Asus may strike back with a dirt-cheap netbook.
Well this is kind of awkward. In an interview published on Forbes’ blog yesterday, Eric Ackerson, a senior product marketing and brand manager at Acer, said that “the death of netbooks is overstated,” in regard to the proliferation of tablets like the iPad. His reasoning is simple: tablets are expensive, netbooks are not.
My first job ever was at Best Buy. I applied when I was 14 and was turned down for being too young. I reapplied at 15, was almost hired, and then got turned down when they asked to see my non-existent driver’s license. I reapplied on my 16th birthday and was finally hired. Nerd alert.
New technology from processor makers Intel and AMD has paved the way for some nice advancements as far as laptop features are concerned. While laptops have generally gotten powerful enough to replace desktop computers for most people, that power has come at the expense of weight, heat and battery life in many instances.
Google’s web-only Chrome OS (operating system) will hit the consumer market next year, with several major manufacturers selling inexpensive notebooks that boot directly into a web browser–no desktop, no “Start Menu,” no “Dock,” just the web.
Buying a netbook is a tricky proposition. By nature, netbooks are fraught with tradeoffs and shortcomings in order to offset low price points and portability. Samsung’s 10-inch NF310 netbook gets a whole lot right without suffering from too many drawbacks.
Dell’s flippy-faced Inspiron Duo will be here in early December, with pricing starting at $549 depending upon the configuration.
At first glance, the 11.6-inch Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830 looks like an ordinary netbook; it’s about an inch thick and weighs around three pounds.
As flavors of Linux go, Ubuntu has been pretty popular over the years. The open source operating system can be installed on a wide range of computer hardware, and there’s even a version called Ubuntu Netbook that’s specially made to optimize the relatively tight 1024×600 screen resolution found on many of today’s netbooks.
